Behind the Stage of the Trump Show

Most news reports and commentaries on the Trump White House are delivered with air of levity and condescension. Trump is projected as a bumbler, an uninformed jokester who isn’t to be taken seriously. At best, reports on Trump’s exploits and tweets are given to the public as a kind of comic relief. People laugh, throw up their hands and move on, except this ain’t a joke.

Most daily newspapers have comics, and yet they also have serious news coverage. Trump and the forces he has unleashed are nothing to laugh about.

Consider what goes virtually unreported during this time of levity and mirth. Trump has installed U.S. judges in less time than most of his predecessors. These efforts will change the courts for generations to come. Moreover, leftist scholars who have examined this government argue that we are witnessing in the false name of populism a kind of neo-fascism, which augers a kind of Trumpian authoritarianism that is downright scary.

Trump and the forces he has unleashed are nothing to laugh about.

John Bellamy Foster, an editor at Monthly Review Magazine, writes that what mainstream media is calling populism isn’t that at all. Foster argues that Trumpism is really a form of neo-fascism, which has elements similar to the European experience of Italian fascism and German Nazism masquerading as nationalism.

Foster cites work of Italian philosopher Julius Evola (1898 to 1974) who gave intellectual weight to the extreme xenophobia, the extreme exaltation of leaders and government corporate collusion that typified Mussolini’s rise during the 1930s. He also notes how fascist find sub-intellectual support vital to their efforts.

Trumpism isn’t a joke. It’s a form of politics that has a long and disastrous history in Europe. Call it by its true name: neo-fascism